Non-Fiction

Between December 1943 and August 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill ignited the Cold War, a superpower rivalry that would dominate the world over half a century, by building an atomic bomb and excluding their Russian allies. Peter Wa …

Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, and disparate areas of interest have been coming together over the past 150 years, converging an …

Published as ‘The Age of Atheists’ in the USA From one of England’s most distinguished intellectual historians comes “an exhilarating ride…that will stand the test of time as a masterful account of” (The Boston Globe) one of the West’s most important i …

In 15,000 B.C. early humankind, who had evolved in Africa tens of thousands of years before and spread out to populate the Earth, arrived in Siberia, during the Ice Age. Because so much water was locked up at that time in the great ice sheets, several …

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy …

Featuring a rich cast of rogues and some of the world’s most prestigious art institutions, this true-life thriller completely exposes the network behind the illegal trade in ancient artefacts. The story begins, as stories do in all good thrillers, with …

In this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world. The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earli …

A Terrible Beauty presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book concentrates on the ideas that made the cen …

Peter Watson tells the story of his five year investigation into Sotheby’s and his discovery of a score of illegal practices that include the facilitation of smuggling, the sale of antiquities known to have been stolen from tombs, fake bidding, and the …

For the past fifty years the Iron Curtain and the Cold War have prevented the truth from being told about one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century: how, exactly, Adolf Hitler died on April 30, 1945, and what happened to his remains. …

Nureyev was the greatest male dancer of his generation but was also a great romantic star both on- and off-stage. He was born on a train, grew up in poverty and began his performing life at folk dances in his village. He progressed rapidly to the Kirov …

In July 1890, having completed his portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent van Gogh shot himself. One hundred years later, the picture was sold at auction by Christie’s for $82.5 million – a world record price. Granted unprecedented access by Christie’s, Peter …

Paolo Veronese’s Allegory of Wisdom and Strength is one of the world’s most distinguished old master paintings. It is acclaimed for its technical virtuosity but also for its incredible journey through history. During more than four centuries it has bee …

As the subtitle explains it: How five art dealers, four policemen, three picture restorers, two auction houses and a journalist plotted to recover some of the world’s most beautiful stolen paintings. Peter Watson went under cover, as ‘A. John Blake’. W …

An account of the psychological experiment in Minneapolis which re-united twins who had been separated at birth – some for as many as forty years – and which revealed the extraordinary coincidences in their lives, even though some of them lived on diff …

An account of the psychological research – much of it secret – carried out by military authorities in America, Britain, Israel, Australia – even Russia – during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, in fields such as interrogation, torture, riflemanship, s …

About Peter

History, science, thrillers … award-winning books in every category; published in more than twenty languages. In his journalism Peter Watson has been partly responsible for jailing nine criminals and securing the release of one man wrongly convicted of murder, and subsequently pardoned.